In a perfect world, school guidance counselors would spend the bulk of their time meeting with students to talk about their future hopes and dreams — and help them work through their day-to-day troubles.

But a new report released by Hamilton Southeastern Schools reveals its counselors are spending most of their time on something quite different: paperwork.

Since the fall of 2016, Hamilton Southeastern has used a $50,000 grant to identify problems with its counseling services in the hopes of earning another grant worth millions to address the issues.

It found that as many as one-third of students aren't meeting with their school counselor, and that counseling practices varied by building or individual employee without "consistent vision, goals or evaluation metrics."

The districtwide student to counselor ratio is 502:1, but varies widely from school to school, reaching up to 789 students per counselor.

The American School Counselor Association recommends a ratio of one school counselor to 250 students. Indiana's average ratio is one counselor to 620 students.

These are surprising findings for a typically high-performing district that has previously prioritized student's mental health. At the beginning of the school year, Hamilton Southeastern added a mental health therapist to each of its buildings.

In addition to helping students through personal crisis, guidance counselors also typically help with problem solving skills at the elementary level and career and college decisions and preparation at the high school level.

This month the district received a $2.1 million grant — about $100 per student — from Lilly Endowment's counseling initiative to start fixing its counseling problems over the next four years. It's likely the largest competitive grant the district has ever received, said assistant superintendent Jan Combs.

Through the initiative, Lilly has distributed a total of $26.4 million in implementation grants and $9.1 million in planning grants, according to a news release. Lilly announced a second round of with $10 million in grants after more than 200 public districts and charters submitted detailed proposals.

The company's goal is to increase the number of Indiana students who are "emotionally healthy, realize academic success, graduate from high school, obtain valuable postsecondary credentials necessary for meaningful employment and are prepared to compete and prosper," according to the website.

"Connected kids are much more likely to succeed academically, behaviorally, than students who are not connected," said Superintendent Allen Bourff. "This grant enables us not only to study options but to begin to reorient the counselors and the entire staffs to expect of guidance counselors more contact with students."

The solution won't be as simple as hiring more counselors to reduce the student-to-counselor ratio. Bourff said that wouldn't be a responsible way to spend the grant money, given that it only lasts four years.

Instead, he said, a large portion of the money will go toward contracting with the American Student Achievement Institute to be trained in its Guiding All Kids counseling model.

Brooke Lawson, the district's mental health coordinator, said the model will align Hamilton Southeastern with national standards in counseling. Within the first year of remodeling the school's programs, she expects HSE will earn the program's Gold Star certification.

Each of the 21 schools will have a steering committee with administrators, teachers and a counselor to set its counseling vision, mission and goals. Ultimately, the district's goal is to lower the achievement gap and dedicate more counseling time to students.

Hamilton Southeastern Schools Foundation Director Freedom Kolb, who helped write the grant, stressed the importance of not assuming Hamilton Southeastern's students are fine because they live in Hamilton County, which has the lowest child poverty rate in the state. While the percentage may be small, she pointed out that HSE still has 3,000 students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunches.